RepRap machines and genealogy

Hey rep-rappers,

This is my first post on the forum. I

Sounds interesting, might get long though. But if there was some sort of code method to do it, it would be cool to trace eir geneality (and get bragging rights to owning "direct lineages"). Although since over time each machine will probably end up being rebuilt completely as parts that fail are replaced by a stock of parts that have been made for use in self repair. So at what point would a reprap become self-built instead of using "daughter parts?

It actually reminds me alot of the Gaijin Species from the novel Manifoldpace where the species name themselves as the combination of their parts(like being named head1123,body99823,arm23123,legs3432 only it's all seeminlgy random letters). As say an arm is replaced, their name changes because of whichever guy built that particular arm.

The point is of course to tell a story about the people behind the machines. This is especially important since the quality of construction will very likely determine how well specific machines perform.

Well-built parents are likely to create parts that are within acceptable margins of error, thus creating a base for well-built children.

In fact, come to think about it this could be a lot like horse breading. If I allow my top stud to bread with your merry their offspring can claim perfect lineage. As with horses this service could come as a price.

And as with horses this lineage may in part determine the quality of the offspring. With reprap machines the quality of the offspring will likely be determined by the quality of the parent machine and the quality of finishing, in other words the person who did the building.

This allows building reputations for successful constructors, something which typically takes time to establish. So getting in the game early seems important.

About refurbishing machines, if you care about genealogy you

Perhaps someday embedding rfid tags in parts as they are extruded will enable a "version control of things".

q.v. spime [en.wikipedia.org]

Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 06/04/2007 10:30AM by bonkydog.

i like this idea. it shouldnt be too hard to do, either in wiki form with links to each child / parent machine. that way each machine can have its own page. i know i would love to create a page with info on my machine. that would be really cool.

You could tie it into the worldwide distribution map with an overlay of parent to part mapping. Interesting spaghetti

I was thinking that in the later developments of extruder, namely when it is capable of relatively fine working. It might be considered when it doesn't cause problems to parts to simply allow another signature layer to be placed on a part. This most likely would be something like a coded that served like a serial number(or possibly a "surname" of your machine) that you might attach to a part that it highly durable and likely to be kept for the lifetime of the machine, but doesn't get in the way so the raised area won't cause things the rub together and possibly put out calibrations as things get worn away.

Hi All,

I just discovered rapid prototyping and reprap a couple of days ago. Having just finished university I'll need to find and settle down to a job before I can begin to really participate, but I was reading the forums when I came across this thread and it reminded me of something I read about a year ago:

[www.theregister.co.uk]

it occurs to me that this sort of thing could potentially be used to embed not only the machine that made it into the RP part, but also a copy of the design file so that should the part be broken, the chip could be wirelessly(is that a word?) read and a replacement part produced. I've already started thinking about the possibility of a write head designed to place SMDs, this would be very similar.